Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema by Barbara Mennel

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema by Barbara Mennel Mary Hennessy Barbara Mennel. Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema. U of Illinois P, 2019. 258 pp. Paper, $27.95. The female characters who populate the films Barbara Mennel examines in Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema—more than thirty from twelve different countries in the European Union— are more likely to live and work in solitude than to engage in the politics of solidarity, and they seem to have little truck with the pioneers of second-wave (film) feminism. Nonetheless (and this is one of Mennel’s central claims), these films share a feminist-materialist investment in contemporary economies of labor— as does Mennel, who argues “that diverse feminist cinemas exist” in contemporary Europe, if only we know where and how to look (18). By zooming out to include multiple countries and contexts and by zooming in on individual films about women workers, Mennel makes a strong case that European cinema has something important to say about gender and the economy. Mennel’s choice of films is eclectic, spanning genre, form, and style. What unites them, she argues, is their depiction of gendered experiences of work in the wake of waning welfare states, rising neoliberalism, and European integration. Chapter topics range from unpaid labor and the specter of second-wave feminism to weird cinema in the wake of financial crisis; from nostalgic heritage films from both the former Eastern Bloc and Western Europe; to reproductive labor and genre cinema. Mennel’s medium-specific analysis— which often, but not exclusively, focuses on narrative— underscores “the ability of filmic aesthetics to contribute to the discourse on women’s labor” (16). While Mennel’s focus is broadly European, the book’s second chapter, “Precarious Work in Feminist Film,” should be of special interest to [End Page 121] German film studies scholars for the way it places a spate of recent films by German directors Tatjana Turanskyj, Maren Ade, and Austrian director Barbara Albert within a larger European framework. The chapter’s focus on precarity and neoliberal economies of labor aligns well with recent directions in feminist German film studies scholarship. Drawing on German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch’s notion of Ungleichzeitigkeit (nonsynchronicity) to account for the “multiple capitalisms, multiple neoliberalisms, and multiple feminisms” (6) that characterize contemporary Europe, Mennel skims the surface of cultural specificity to take a more panoramic view. I would wager that this book will introduce readers— even those who watch twenty-first-century European cinema with interest— to films they might otherwise never encounter. The book will thus serve as a useful tool for teaching not only European film from the last two decades but also social theory, feminist theory, and film analysis. In chapter 4, which examines films about women who migrate for work and focuses on the voice as a site for mediating female agency, I was fascinated to learn, for example, of Martina Preissner’s 2010 documentary film Wir sitzen im Süden (2010; We are based down south) about Istanbul call centers run by German companies. Mennel cites as the impetus for her study the dearth of film scholarship on work, on the one hand, and the close historical relationship between film and work, on the other. For the latter she attends to the prevalence of early-twentieth-century industrial films that aestheticized work. Given Mennel’s focus on the depiction of female characters in mostly narrative cinema, it seems to me that a discussion of the history of the depiction of women workers on-screen, from the Lumiére brothers to DEFA and across nonfictional and fictional films, would have been most helpful for historicizing and framing her own interest in contemporary cinema, gender, and labor. Do the cheerful typists in Germany’s late Weimar Bürofilme (office films) have a corollary in other European countries? I tend to see such a question not necessarily as a marker of what Mennel left out but rather as a sign that she has opened the door for further questions for feminist scholars to pursue, both in historical and contemporary frameworks and in a variety of...